Retail businesses have had an increasing desire to monitor the state of store shelves to ensure merchandise is available and in the correct place. When merchandise is not available on store shelves, the business could be losing sales opportunities. In some cases the stores themselves do not stock the shelves and rely on product distributors to keep shelves stocked. Retailers, and their manufacturer/distributor partners with whom they share information, can get sales information from point of sale data to determine rate of sales and to manage inventory. Likewise, there have been systems developed to track products while in transport, and store inventory. However, shelf information is not yet as developed as point of sale data.
For higher priced items, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags can be affixed to individual items, and an in-store transponder can periodically check for the presence of items. But for low cost, high volume items RFID is not a practical means of tracking real time on-shelf product or merchandise information. Some retailers have begun using cameras to monitor shelves, coupled with image processing technology to recognize and count product items on shelves. However, these systems can confuse promotional material that shows graphical content similar or identical to product labels with products themselves, and miscount the number of items on product shelves.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved method and apparatus that solves the problems associated with the prior art distinguishing between product labels and shelf edge promotional content so that shelf edge content is not counted falsely as product labels.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of embodiments of the present invention.
The apparatus and method components have been represented where appropriate by conventional symbols in the drawings, showing only those specific details that are pertinent to understanding the embodiments of the present invention so as not to obscure the disclosure with details that will be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein.